


Suppressed Memories

by Haely_Potter



Series: Bending the Universe [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: But the characters didn't listen, F/M, Gen, Humor, Meant to be angst, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-27 16:24:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haely_Potter/pseuds/Haely_Potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if the Doctor forgot Rose and she came back?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Returning

"Doctor!" was shouted outside the TARDIS and Amy, Rory and the Doctor turned to the doors which were opened by a blond woman and a brown haired man. They stopped when they got a look inside the TARDIS before the man shrugged.

"He's redecorated," he said simply.

"But I liked the coral theme," the woman answered back. "And he's regenerated," she said, nodding to the Doctor. "No one else would dress like that."

"Oi! Are you saying I have bad taste?" the man protested.

"Does number six ring a bell? That coat was murder even if it was easily found in a crowd," the woman rolled her eyes.

"Excuse me, but who are you?" the Doctor asked. They looked familiar and a feeling of desperate longing, love and heart break told him they were important to him, but for the life of him he couldn't remember.

The woman looked at him up and down and he felt the need to preen for her. But then she turned to the man beside her. "You sure this isn't a previous regeneration?"

"Yes! I would know if he was! But you know, amnesia isn't an unheard-of side effect of regeneration," the man defended himself, his hands up in surrender. "In fact, my, well, our, eight incarnation woke up with no memories at all and spent the next twenty-four hours regaining them, after he woke up, that is." He turned to the Doctor. "When did you regenerate?"

"Three centuries ago," answered the Doctor, mystified how these two knew so much of him, ignoring Amy's pointed looks and Rory's defensive posture.

"Okay, not regeneration related amnesia then," the man frowned.

"Nice to know how much I mean to you, Doctor, really, you didn't forget Sarah Jane in six regenerations but me, oh no, Rose Tyler's not important, let's forget her barely in three centuries," the woman said sarcastically, hiding her hurt.

"You know that's not true!" the man argued. "He probably suppressed his memories of you because they hurt so much. I mean, we nearly committed suicide the first time we lost you! Losing anyone else has never hurt as much, you know, no one, not Jamie and Zoe, not Sarah Jane, not Adric and Tegan, not Ace, not Susan, not even Gallifrey. After the Time War we weren't exactly keeping safe but we never actively looked for ways to off ourselves, always with at least a half-hearted plan to save ourselves, but after you, well, you saw that parallel universe where we didn't meet Donna. And we offered ourself to the Daleks in New York with Martha. We wouldn’t have minded if they’d killed us right then and there."

"So that's what the nagging feeling is!" the Doctor proclaimed, grinning. "Suppressed memories tickle when they're trying to resurface," he explained to the Ponds and turned back to their visitors. "I really have no idea who you are, but I'm the Doctor, nice to meet you."

"Hello, I'm the Doctor Tyler," the man introduced himself. "That's Rose Tyler, the Girl who Always Came Back, the Pink and Yellow human, the Shop Girl who said No, the Valiant Child, the Dame of Powell Estate, the Bad Wolf, the One We Believe In. The One You Gave Up."

With each name the Doctor Tyler gave the woman, Rose, more memories popped up in the Doctor's head, of the woman, then a girl, in different period clothes, on different alien planets, in a small flat in London and twice, on two horrible occasions, on a desolate beach in Norway. Other people were connected to her, people he hadn't remembered before, Jackie Tyler the Mother-in-law he never wanted, the immortal Captain Jack Harkness, Mickey the idiot, Martha Jones the Star, the amazing Donna Noble, the human meta-crisis, Wilfred Mott who took up his granddaughter's place in watching the skies for him. But most of all, he remembered his last incarnation who looked like the Doctor Tyler, with big hair and side burns and brown pinstriped suits and over coats and converse and his ninth incarnation with the big ears and hawk nose and blue eyes and leather jacket. The one who said-

"Run," he said aloud, tears streaming down his face as he stared into the distance.

Rose grinned and stepped closer. "That's the word," she quipped, turning his attention to her. Before anyone could blink, the Doctor had stepped up to her and had her in a hug, his face buried in her neck.

"Regeneration is supposed to make Time Lords operational again," he whispered by her ear, "by any means necessary. Normally it's just physical, repair the damaged cells by regenerating, but there have been accounts of it numbing feelings and suppressing memories that were too painful to handle, memories that were, and are once more, my everything. I literally had to suppress my memories so that I wouldn't just… throw myself into the way of an oncoming truck or the closest supernova."

"Doctor," she whispered back, hugging him just as tightly. "You didn't give me a chance to choose, I would have chosen you, still would choose you. And you didn't give him time to find where he began and you ended. A few weeks after you left us behind, he came to the conclusion, that while he loved me, it was more brotherly affection, because Donna, no matter how fantastic, didn't love me. In fact, he quite happily discovered he's gay."

"What, really?" asked the Doctor as he drew back to look at the metacrisis.

"Oh yes!" the Doctor Tyler grinned. "I'm more Donna than either of us expected. Rose is without a doubt the most gorgeous woman I've ever met, but Jack's much more up my street."

Rose rolled her eyes at him. "Jack's more up everyone's street. I mean, he's like my brother, but he's gorgeous, and if he wasn't like my brother, I wouldn't have minded a one night stand."

"I would've!" protested the Doctor indignantly.

Rose and the Doctor Tyler gave him deadpan stares. "You didn't like me talking to any males at all, and God help them if you caught them flirting with me."

"You had such double standards back then," the Doctor Tyler pointed out. "You didn't like her flirting with others but you had no problem flirting yourself."

"I liked it when Rose was jealous!" the Doctor pouted. "Not that there was anything to be jealous of."

"Doctor? Who are they?" Amy finally demanded.

"Ah!" the Doctor whirled around to face her and Rory. "Ponds! These are Rose Tyler and… well, I can't say clone, he obviously isn't me if he's not in love with Rose, but… I guess I could say he's my half-human brother…" He turned to Rose and Doctor Tyler. "Rose, Doctor Tyler, these are the Ponds! Amy and Rory! They're married!"

"And here I thought they were siblings," Doctor Tyler piped up sarcastically with a roll of his eyes in a distinctly Donna fashion. "The rings certainly didn't give it away."

"Please tell me you're not as marriage-focused as Donna?" pleaded the Doctor.

"Of course not!" Doctor Tyler said, insulted. Then he smirked. "I'll be happy with just sharing a mortgage with someone I'll love."


	2. The Other Woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor Tyler tells River some hard truths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This wasn't supposed to exist at all, but I had written that bit about the Gallifreyan marriage customs and realized it'd fit perfectly to this 'verse, with a little honing of course.

River walked into the console room. Mother had said something about visitors from the Doctor’s past and suppressed memories and she was always interested in his past, even after her dissertation on him. Who was it? Who had the technology to visit him while on a different planet and in a different time? Could it be another Doctor? Could it be a time loop?

There was a blond woman sitting on the jump seat normally reserved for the Doctor, smiling widely and her hands in her lap, not at all reserved or defensive like someone meeting an old friend normally would. The Doctor was leaning against the console, talking, explaining some adventure or another, his hands flying around without a care in the world. When the woman laughed, River saw him pause for a second and smile, like her laughter was the most beautiful sound in the Universe, before continuing where he left off. There was another man in the console room, watching the two with a content smile, leaning against the railing, his arms crossed on his chest, and River was astonished when she recognized his face: he was the Doctor! His tenth regeneration to be precise. Except… he didn’t feel like the Doctor, not completely.

Intrigued, she walked up to him. “Hello, I’m Professor River Song,” she said and offered her hand to him.

He turned to her in surprise, as if he wasn’t sure she should be there at all. “Doctor Tyler,” he shook her hand, a curious frown on his face. “Metacrisis clone of himself over there,” he nodded towards the Doctor.

“Where’d Tyler come from? Normally you… he… you go by John Smith,” River pointed out.

“Yeah, but, John Smith is so… fake, and I had to create a whole human identity. Who a better inspiration for a name than the woman who made me, well, me. Well, the two women. My human birth certificate says Donny Tyler, honoring both Donna Noble and Rose Tyler. Rose is over there, by the way, talking with the Doctor. I can’t believe he still hasn’t actually said it to her yet, or that they’re here, talking, and not somewhere more private doing… oh, Rassilon, I don’t want to think of that! I need brain bleach!”

Dread filled River. “Said what?”

“That he loves her, that he’s loved her since she saved his life for the first time. Since before their first date,” the Clone rolled his eyes in frustration. “You wouldn’t believe the things he thought since day one. Of course, that regeneration beat himself up quite thoroughly for being a dirty old man but he indulged himself, dying to save her, with a kiss. This him,” he pointed at himself, “was much more comfortable with it as they weren’t mistaken for father and daughter or guardian and ward all that often. Queen Victoria don’t count, she was short sighted in her olden days. This him was also much more tactile and he took advantage of it to the fullest in the form of excess hand holding and lingering hugs. Though, coward that he was, he never said anything.”

“The Doctor doesn’t love her anymore,” River said with conviction, looking at the Clone dead in the eye.

“How so?” he challenged.

“He’s married, for one,” she answered.

“Oh, yes that hand-fastening ceremony in the aborted timeline,” he said after a short pause. He tapped his temple. “Basically the same mind, me and him, took just a few minutes to synchronize, but you know what? I don’t find a marriage bond in his mind.

“Gallifreyan hand-fastening is an old custom, yes, but do you know what it really is? It was used by Gallifreyans in case their underage children had conceived a child and marriage was the only way to save face in the society. Hand-fastenings weren’t like bondings, they were completely superficial involving no kind of telepathy which, for Gallifreyans, was like… oh, god, humans don’t have an equivalent… The closest thing, I suppose, would be a prenup, “you keep yours, I keep mine, because I don’t trust you,” but with themselves rather than property. Congratulations, you got yourself a shotgun wedding that had no other witnesses but your parents in an aborted timeline in an alternate universe that never existed. If you think that means anything, you really are delusional.”

The Doctor, the Other Doctor, the Clone, was looking at River with such pity in his eyes that River averted her eyes. That was a mistake however as she accidentally glanced at the real Doctor with the blond girl – woman. He was leaning in her personal space in a way he never did with her, smiling a smile he never smiled with her, eyes shining in a completely new way. It was like the Doctor had become a completely different man, someone else wearing the face of the man she loved.

In a way, she supposed, this was like regenerating, getting back memories that had made him into the man she saw before her now, the man he should have been all this time. Obviously, being robbed of those memories hadn’t been good for him. From her research into the Doctor’s past she knew that while his ninth and tenth selves had been capable of horrors (and it had been expected by the Silence), he had been tempered by something. That something was Rose Tyler. Until he lost her. Of some incidents there is very little information on but an account from 1930s New York revealed a rather disturbing display of self destructive behavior on the Doctor’s part. He was generally more careless with himself and his companions when he wasn’t with Rose (it was hard, putting them in chronological order for the Doctor, especially because River didn’t know anything of his trips to the future… maybe the answer to the mystery of Rose Tyler was after the 51st century?). The Doctor she knew wasn’t really bothered by her blaster, but the clone and the Doctor with the returned memories had eyed it distastefully. Her Doctor didn’t flinch from killing those that had to be killed.

“The difference between Rose and, well, everyone else who ever traveled with himself, is that the Doctor will always love Rose Tyler, despite what regeneration he’s in,” the clone continued. “The first time Rose met the Doctor, she was, what, six months old? Something like that. It was the day her father died. The first time the Doctor met Rose, was during a xeno-culture class in the Academy when she was already traveling with the Doctor. That’s when he started wanting to run around the Universe, exploring, rather than just running away. She awakened his curiosity. They continued to randomly meet through the Doctor’s life, never staying there, because there were timelines to maintain. The Doctor could see it, it wasn’t time for him to keep her. But when it was, he didn’t feel like he deserved it and so he tried to frighten her away at first. That worked as well as carrying water in a sieve, I’m sure you can imagine. She just got curious. And then she saved his life when she should have been running away. So he offered her a chance to go with him and she declined. Dejected, the Doctor left and accidentally landed in 1998. He met a twelve-year-old Rose. It had been a hard year and she didn’t expect to get any presents that Christmas. He went and got her a red bike. Then he went back to the nineteen-year-old Rose as he’d remembered he hadn’t told her TARDIS also travels in time. She accepted. From then on it may seem like a Florence Nightingale syndrome for the Doctor, falling in love with the woman who makes him better, but it’s really not. It had been coming for centuries. Now that he has her again, I don’t think he’s going to let her go any time soon. I am sorry, I am so, so sorry, but there is no way he is going to leave her behind again.”

River didn’t want to believe it, she wanted things to go back the way they were before these two people reentered the Doctor’s life, to go back to a time she could count on the Doctor to be there to catch her if she jumped off a building or flung herself out of an airlock.  
But then… her time with him was coming to an end. He’d introduced her as Professor River Song to Amy at Byzanthium’s crash, and he had been… skittish was the word. He hadn’t really returned her flirting… he didn’t flirt back until the mess with the Silence and Lake Silencio. Was he still _mourning_ Rose? But… he didn’t remember Rose at the time! At least, not consciously. Could she have affected him so deeply he mourned her even when he couldn’t remember her? Amy had missed Rory when he’d been erased from time, even when she didn’t remember him, so it was possible…

It was like she was both the answer and curse of River’s marriage. Right before they married, he had said he didn’t want to marry her. (Did he want to marry Rose? The Clone certainly seemed to think so…)

Silently River and the Clone watched the Doctor wrap his arms around Rose’s waist, her back to his chest, as he pointed something on the monitor screen to her. She laughed and craned her neck to look at him, covering his hands on her tummy with her own. He, in turn, looked down at her, to make sure she was paying attention to him. Then, ignorant of their audience, he nuzzled her hair, making her laugh again. Rose turned her attention back to the screen and the Doctor continued talking into her hair, occasionally tugging his hand free to point at something, always returning it to her tummy.

Heart break coursed through River. Her and the Doctor’s relationship had never been like that, just… being together. Some of the blame could, yes, be put on her being in Stormcage and their reverse timelines because of that, but part of it was also because she was, because of the Silence, a psychopath. Of course, she wasn’t the only mentally unstable in their relationship, but she didn’t know how to interact with him if they weren’t running for their lives or flirting up a storm. And, not matter how she wanted, it wasn’t a healthy relationship. She always thought they’d have all the time in the Universe once their reverse timelines were sorted out, but… she hadn’t had to introduce herself to the Doctor yet. That day scared her more than anything, the day he looked at her and didn’t recognize her at all. He had been her reason for living since practically her birth, and here he was, her husband, holding another woman.

Though, she thought bitterly, in this scenario she might be the “Other Woman.”

She had never been the “Other Woman.” He had always been her husband and the occasional random female (or male or unspecified) who showed interest in the Doctor had been the dreaded “Other Woman.”

River trusted he would still be there for her, but never as her husband again. There was no magister to go to to annul their marriage, no marriage certificate to rip in two, no rings to take off. And, according to the Clone, it wasn’t even proper marriage to begin with. Hell, she didn’t even remember it, not properly like she remembered everything else. It had happened in a few seconds’ time, that whole erased timeline, and it was hard to remember, even for someone like her with her human plus genetics.

Her hands balled into fists as she fought to control her emotions, breathing deeply through her nose. It wouldn’t do to kill Rose, it would achieve nothing good, especially with the Doctor. Maybe she should take her leave for now. There had been something strange happening in 1930’s New York and she’d meant to check it out for quite some time now and now she had a reason to flee the TARDIS under the pretense of letting the Doctor and Rose catch up.

She glanced at them, swaying to the music the TARDIS had started playing – was it _In the Mood_? Was the TARDIS encouraging them? – ignorant to the outside world, and headed back to her room to pack – and say goodbye to her parents. They would understand.


End file.
